The Vision Thing

A Secret Service agent awaiting the president in a 2004 file photo. (Jodi Cobb/National Geographic)

A new book claims the Secret Service once changed a motorcade route -- because of a warning from a psychic. D.C. author Ronald Kessler tells a story in "In the President's Secret Service" about George H.W. Bush's 1992 trip to Enid, Okla. State law enforcement urged agent Norm Jarvis to talk to a psychic who had helped on local cases, he told Kessler. The psychic told Jarvis she'd had a vision of the president being shot as the motorcade neared an overpass. Her vision made little sense -- she saw Bush sitting on the left (he always sat on the right) and wearing an open-neck shirt and light jacket instead of the suit and tie planned for this trip. But then she accurately predicted which airport hangars housed the presidential limo and helicopter. And then the president stepped off Air Force One in an open-neck shirt and light jacket ... and THEN slid over to the limo's left side! Kessler writes that the team "decided the psychic could not be ignored," and rerouted the motorcade away from overpasses. A Secret Service rep told CQ that Kessler's story "doesn't make sense" but conceded that Jarvis might have told it.